75. Agricultural Rites

The rites of spring

Every spring I get depressed. Last month I had the stunning realization that graduate student recruitment is a major cause of my spring depression. Each year, as the days lengthen, graduate programs engage in their ritualistic seduction of prospective students. In the past 15 years, US institutions, including the most elite and respected, have evolved mating displays worthy of birds and fish. T...

From Rites to Rights:

It is the charge of economic history not only to explain the economic past, but to use it to enrich and develop economic theory (North, 1994). In paleoeconomics, theory plays the additional role of adding veracity of accounts based on sparse evidence through the demonstration of internal consistency. We synthesize pre-historical and historical evidence available from the settlement and moderniz...

Important Fertility symbols and Rites (Northern India)

Man has always been fascinated by miscellaneous elements in nature. Amongst them all, the most astonishing is the principle of world i.e. ‘ seed’ and ‘womb’, and the vital role played for their existence is by ‘prana’ or breath. This theory led to the evolution of the cult of fertility. In almost all religious practices fertility is represented with symbols, rituals and prayers. In plain langua...

The Last Rites of Public Campaign Financing?

Dance Dance Education and Rites of Passage

The experience of a successful adolescent learner will be described from the student’s perspective about learning the video game Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) through selected passages from a phenomenological interview. The question driving this investigation is, “Why did she sustain engagement in learning?” The importance of this question came out of the need for background on how to create an ...